Evolutionary PSYC Study Guide Exam 2 | 2024 University of Nebraska Omaha

R = 15, S = 5, T = 20, P = 10

Which of the following sets of values conforms to the payoffs of a classic Prisoner’s Dilemma?

Reverse engineering

Taking a feature of an organism, and then inferring what type of environment would have caused that feature to be an adaptation is known as:

Cheater detection module

Cosmides and Tooby claim that the Wason Selection Task that deals with drinking age and whether people are drinking alcohol or soda activates a _____________________ in the brain, because it involves the violation of a social contract.

Women with severe pregnancy sickness are more likely to miscarry than women who never get ill.

Which of the following regarding women and pregnancy sickness if FALSE?

They illustrate behavior, which is rarely fossilized, and they show that Australopithecus afarensis was bipedal.

Why were the fossils discovered at Laetoli, Tanzania so important?

The tragedy of the commons.

A new public television station starts up in the U.S. without the help of any government funding. Millions of people watch the programming every day, but when it comes time to donate money to the station, only a few thousand people actually do, putting the future of the station in jeopardy. This is an example of:

Kin selection

A subset of natural selection that illustrates how altruism can evolve if it’s directed toward relatives is called:

Males are traced using Y-chromosome markers, and females are traced using mitochondrial DNA markers.

How do scientists at the Genographic Project trace the human migratory patterns of males and females?

Dinosaurs

Which type of animal went extinct approximately 65 million years ago, allowing for mammals to diversify and fill their empty niches?

Eusociality

The type of social system that is found in bees, termites, and ants, in which an entire colony supports one reproductive individual, is called:

They had smaller brains than either modern humans or Neanderthals.

Which of the following statements about Denisovans is false?

1 sibling, 1 parent, and 3 cousins

Which of the following combinations of relatives would geneticist JBS Haldane be MOST willing to lay down his life for, from an inclusive fitness perspective? (note: This isn't necessarily the relatives he said he'd lay his life down for when it was discussed it in class, but the ones that in theory he should be most willing to sacrifice for.)

Reproductive value

______________________ is a measure of the age-specific future likelihood of producing offspring relative to the average of the population as a whole.

Form friendships with other males

Male baboons who fail to ______________ rarely gain sexual access to females.

Aunt, nephew, grandmother, half-brother

Which of the following lists of relatives contain only those relatives that are related to a focal individual by 0.25, i.e. r = 0.25 (assume all aunts/uncles are blood relatives, and not via marriage)?

An act that decreases the actor’s direct fitness while increasing the direct fitness of a recipient.

The definition of altruism as used in this class is:

more frequent and more stable

Viking alliances among relatives were ________________________ compared with alliances among non-relatives.

Individuals must be able to recognize other individuals.

Under which of the following circumstance(s) is reciprocal altruism predicted to evolve in a population?

Though it defects on the first move, it is unlikely to defect in the future.

Tit for Tat is a behavioral strategy that is successful for many reasons. All of the following describe the Tit for Tat strategy except:

They’re given a sticker or pin to wear

A study showed that people are more likely to give blood if _________________.

They have the largest number of individuals of any other early human fossils.

Why are the Homo nalediI fossils found in a single cave in South Africa important?

0.0625 (1/16)

In the family tree below, what is the coefficient of relatedness (r) between individuals X and Y? 

The direct fitness benefits to the receiver

In Hamilton’s inequality describing the evolution of altruism, rB>C, what does the “B” stand for?

Inclusive fitness hypothesis

In Paul Sherman’s study on ground squirrels, which hypothesis received the MOST support from his observations?

All of the above are ways rats shows adaptations to eating new foods

Which of the following is NOT an adaptation that rats have shown with regard to food?

Allows people to gather information about how cooperative (or not) others in the social group might be.

Evolutionary psychologists suggest that gossip is important to humans because it:

Due to competition from modern humans (Homo sapiens) or perhaps climate change

Why is it thought Neanderthals went extinct?

A higher likelihood of abuse happening to step-children as opposed to biological children in a household.

Which of the following correctly describes the Cinderella Effect?

Homo erectus

Which was the first human species to migrate out of Africa?

all of the above are advantages to bipedalism

All of the following are proposed advantages to bipedalism except:

Selection pressures.

Aspects of the environment that affect the survival and reproduction of individuals are called:

0.75, 0.5, and 0.25

Female bees are more likely to help the queen produce more sisters than to have their own offspring because females are related to their sisters at a level of r =____, whereas they would be related to their own offspring at a level of r = _____. In addition, females are more likely to raise sisters than brothers since they’re only related to brothers at the level of r = _____.

Devonian lobe-finned fish

The early vertebrate that most likely used its limbs to prop itself up in receding waters, and was the first appearance of the tetrapod (i.e. four-limbed) body plan was:

The statistical composite of selection pressures that shaped human adaptations.

The Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA) is:

Is most common among infertile or post-reproductive couples.

Adoption:

Eomaia

The first true mammals (females gave birth to live young and fed their offspring with milk) are called:

The responding individual was recently groomed by the caller.

In vervet monkeys, an individual is more likely to respond to the distress call of another individual if:

Extremely more likely

Canadian children living in households with at least one step-parent were __________________________ to suffer fatal abuse than same-aged children living with both biological parents.

Unrelated by blood, and only related by marriage.

Of the murder victims that were relatives in Detroit in 1972, victims were most likely to be:

Australia

According to the Genographic project, which continent was the FIRST that people populated after leaving Africa?

Being the first animals to have the tetrapod body plan.

What evolutionary innovation are Devonian lobe-finned fish responsible for?

They are one of the rare instances of behavior fossilizing, and show that Australopithecenes were bipedal.

Why are the Laetoli footprints so important?

Old world monkeys tend to have better thumbs, but new world monkeys have a grasping tail.

What are some differences between old world and new world monkeys?

Making and using tools

Which of the following could NOT be a reason bipedalism originally evolved?

Homo heidelbergensis

Which human ancestor likely hunted cooperatively with spears, and gave rise to our own species as well as Neanderthals and Denisovans?

There was a fair amount of interbreeding between modern humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans, and Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA can be found in modern humans today.

What have we learned recently about our own species with relation to Neanderthals and Denisovans?

We have many more individuals of that species represented in the fossil record compared with others.

Why is Homo naledi such an interesting find?

When an organism has some sort of environmental challenge, it usually means that it will evolve an adaptation in order to deal with that challenge.

Which of the following is FALSE with regard to how we should think about whether something is an adaptation or not?

An abundance of food

Which of the following is something that would NOT have been a selection pressure in the human EEA?

Evolutionary mismatch

In the past, having a preference for high-calorie, high-fat and high-sugar foods would have been an advantage since those foods were hard to come by. Today, having a preference for those foods can make us overweight and unhealthy. This is an example of:

Inclusive fitness = direct fitness + indirect fitness

Which of the following is correct regarding inclusive fitness?

The direct fitness benefits to the receiver

In Hamilton’s inequality, what does the “B” stand for?

Because they’re more closely-related to their sisters than they would be to their own offspring.

In an evolutionary (ultimate) sense, why do worker bees give up personal reproduction and help raise their siblings instead?

Offspring

In a study looking at Canadian wills, who got the most assets?

Having a step-parent in the household.

In studies of groups of various places, what was shown to lead to greater mortality for children in a family group?

Own children of a current mate : Step-children of a former mate : Step-children of a current mate

In a study of New Mexico men, they were most likely to pay for college for ________________, and least likely to pay for __________________. ________________ were in between.

If the murderer stood to gain a lot by killing a family member.

In a study looking at Vikings and their families, when were Vikings likely to murder their family members?

T > R > P > S

What is the correct order from most advantageous to least advantageous in a classic Prisoner’s Dilemma, when R = reward for mutual cooperation, T = temptation to defect, S = sucker’s payoff, and P = punishment for mutual defection?

A relatively fluid (i.e. changing) social group.

Which of the following is NOT something that would be required for reciprocal altruism to exist?

Cooperate on the first move, then mirror the opponent’s moves (i.e. cooperate if the other player is cooperating, but defect as soon as the other player defects).

The winning strategy in an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game was Tit for Tat. What is the general strategy of Tit for Tat?

Social Brain

One hypothesis, the _________________ Hypothesis, states that we evolved at least some of our particular type of intelligence due to living in fairly permanent social groups.

Both sides fired their weapons, but intentionally missed their targets.

What happened when soldiers in WWII ended up fighting the same people on the opposing side for long periods of time?